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German Social Science, Meiji Conservatism, and the Peculiarities of Japanese History*
ERIK GRIMMER-SOLEM
Wesleyan University
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The German Origins of Japanese Exceptionalism | |
| Sir Rutherford Alcock, the first British minister in Tokyo, remarked in 1863 that Japan was a land of paradoxes impelled "by some occult law ... in a perfectly opposite direction and reversed order."1 This view of Japan, borrowed directly from Herodotus's description of the ancient Egyptians, has had a long career among foreign observers of Japan and drives the notion of Japanese exceptionalism to this day. Yet as historians of Japan know, the Western notion of Japanese peculiarity is newer than is often realized. Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716), a German doctor in Dutch service in Japan and author of the celebrated History and Description of Japan (1777–1779), admired Japan as familiar, similar to Europe, and, in some respects, a civilization ahead of the West.2 A trend beginning with the Enlightenment subsumed Japan into a uniform progress of human civilization with Europe at its pinnacle; Japan and the rest of East Asia began to compare unfavorably, feeding stereotypes and preconceptions that have distorted the West's understanding of Japan ever since.3 |
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While this progressive, orientalizing telos is most readily associated with nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberal opinion,4 it was hardly confined to any single point on the ideological spectrum or, for that matter, to Europeans and Americans. A particularly influential interpretation of Japanese exceptionalism was developed by interwar Japanese Marxists building on the "Asiatic mode of production"—itself a notoriously imprecise concept derived largely from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British economists and European travel literature—one that greatly overestimated the feudal nature of Japanese society and exaggerated the role of the Meiji state in the development of the Japanese economy.5 Through the pioneering work of the historian E. H. Norman and his students, a version of this interpretation in turn came to dominate not only mid twentieth-century American scholarship on Meiji Japan, but also the policies of the American military occupation in Japan after 1945.6 |
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With exceptionalism figuring so centrally in prewar narratives of Japan, it is not surprising that comparisons would be drawn to that other modern deviant—Germany—a comparison obviously heavily encouraged by the two countries' ties in World War II. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that the Sonderweg thesis—the notion that Germany pursued a peculiar and ultimately dangerous path of historical development set in the nineteenth century that culminated in National Socialism—should come to figure quite as centrally in the historical assessment of a country halfway around the globe.7 In a nutshell, the argument is that Japanese officials, academics, and students in law, government, economics, as well as other fields, developed a close relationship with their German counterparts during the 1880s that lasted well through the twentieth century. A number of these German influences would justify authoritarian, statist, semi-feudal, and nativist tendencies in Meiji Japan, thereby reinforcing Japanese peculiarity and deviance from liberal-democratic patterns of development. |
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